|Número de publicación||US6968166 B2|
|Tipo de publicación||Concesión|
|Número de solicitud||US 10/054,094|
|Fecha de publicación||22 Nov 2005|
|Fecha de presentación||22 Ene 2002|
|Fecha de prioridad||22 Ene 2002|
|También publicado como||US20030139160|
|Número de publicación||054094, 10054094, US 6968166 B2, US 6968166B2, US-B2-6968166, US6968166 B2, US6968166B2|
|Inventores||George L. Yang|
|Cesionario original||George L. Yang|
|Exportar cita||BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan|
|Citas de patentes (10), Citada por (13), Clasificaciones (13), Eventos legales (4)|
|Enlaces externos: USPTO, Cesión de USPTO, Espacenet|
The present invention relates to digital automatic gain control (AGC) circuits and, more particularly, to the AGC circuits of package-switched high-speed wireless communication systems.
In wireless communications, due to large variations in received signal power caused by propagation attenuation (e.g., fading due to buildings or geographic features), a control mechanism referred as automatic gain control (AGC) has to be used in a receiver to control the gain of the receiving amplifier dynamically so that subsequent sections can operate within a desired operating range. These sections include amplifiers, mixers, analog-to-digital converters (ADC), and baseband analog or digital processing devices. An AGC circuit is designed to keep the amplified received signal at a near-constant level over a large dynamic range of received signal power levels. The parameters involved in designing an AGC circuit include its operational range and its response time.
In some communication systems, the signal variation can exceed 80 to 90 dB in signal power. This wide variation range could be caused by hills or buildings and power control failure occurring when a mobile station is in close proximity to a base station. It is desirable for an AGC circuit to be able to operate in a very wide range so that the communication system can work in many scenarios.
In package-switched wireless communications, AGC has to setup on every package. The more time for setting up AGC, the less time available for transmitting data. Therefore, the effective data transmission rate will be reduced. The problem is more obvious and serious when the transmission rate is very high. With a faster AGC circuit, a communication system will have more time to transmit data and therefore increase its capacity.
In a wireless communication system, the power consumption is one of the major concerns. In order to make the communication system to work for longer time with the same battery, every subsystem including AGC should consume as less power as possible.
One technology to make an AGC circuit to have wide operational ranges is given by U.S. Pat. No. 4,263,560, entitled. LOG-EXPONENTIAL AGC CIRCUIT, by Dennis W. Ricker.
The digital AGC circuit shown in
There are some problems with the digital AGC of
One problem associated with the digital implementation is hardware consuming and time consuming. First, a lot of hardware is needed to build circuits to approximate both logarithmic function and exponential function. Second, a lot of time is needed for the circuits to complete the calculation of logarithmic function and exponential function. The more hardware and more time will lead more power consumption and reduce effective data rate in package-switched high-speed wireless communications.
Another problem is associated with signal strength. When the incoming signal is very strong, there is distortion on the output of variable-gain amplifier and therefore the output of digital envelope detector will not correctly reflect the signal strength. In the digital implementation, there is an extra problem. The signal after ADC could be limited even if the signal before ADC is not. When the incoming signal is very strong, the output of ADC does not correctly reflect the coming signal strength due to the operational range limitation of an ADC circuit. Due to quantisation error of ADC, there is some discrepancy between input and output of an ADC. When the incoming signal is very weak, this discrepancy could be very significant considering the relatively small incoming signal.
Using the notations on
where E is the error signal, R is the reference signal level, X is the envelope, K is the output of integrator, G is the gain, T is the clock cycle of gain adjustment, the nT is the moment of the nth clock cycle, and α is the adjusting coefficient embedded in the integrator 170. α is a positive number and usually much smaller than 1.
Further, one can derive
Therefore, the gain adjusting factor F is
F=β·X −α (2)
Due to the features of package-switched high-speed wireless communication systems, it is very important to have a very wide range, power saving, and fast response AGC circuit.
It is an object of this invention to provide a digital AGC implementation with wide operational range, fast response time, and less hardware.
It is another object of this invention to provide a methodology to design a digital AGC circuit with a preferred relation between signal strength and gain adjusting factor.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a methodology of AGC to utilize, both current and previous, signal strengths and gains to update gain.
It is another object of this invention to provide an AGC structure that is flexible to update gain in a preferred way.
It is another object of this invention to provide an AGC structure that is able to update gain more properly when the incoming signal is very strong or very weak signal.
The drawing figures depict preferred embodiments of the present invention by way of example, not by way of limitations.
A variable-gain amplifier 310 amplifies the input signal Sin by an amplification factor controlled by the analog gain control signal from a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) 380. The output of the variable-gain amplifier 310, which is in analog form, is then converted into digital signal Sout by an ADC device 320. A signal strength estimator 330, which is able to extract the strength information from a signal, generates the signal strength X from Sout. A signal strength estimator 330 could be an envelope detector, a magnitude moving average, or peak detector with periodical reset.
When the parameters α and β are given, gain adjusting factor device 340 will find the gain adjusting factor F according to formula (2) or the relation specified by
A multiplier 350 will multiply the gain adjusting factor F with output of a delay device 370. The output of multiplier 350 will be sent to a mapping device 360. There are two purposes for the mapping device 360. The first purpose is to make sure that the input of multiplier 350 will not become zero and that its output will not be overflowed. The second purpose is to make sure that the output of the digital-to-analog (DAC) 380 will be in a proper range to control the variable-gain amplifier 310. In many situations, the mapping device 360 behaviors just like a regular limiter even through more complex mapping could be applied.
The output of the mapping device 360 is sent to a delay device 370. The main purpose is to make sure there is at least a delay in the loop consisting of multiplier 350, mapping device 360, and delay device 370.
The output of delay device 370 will be converted into analog gain control signal by the DAC device 380. The analog gain control signal will then control variable-gain amplifier 310. The output of 370 is also connected to one terminal of multiplier 350.
In order to get rid of the exponential device, one can approximate the curve of
The digital AGC circuit, generally denoted by 600 in
The gain adjusting factor device 640 in
It could be noticed that both gain adjusting factor device 640 in
A modified digital AGC, generally denoted as 800, is shown in
It could be also noticed that the digital AGC circuits on
Another modified digital AGC, generally denoted as AGC 900 is shown in
The gain generating device 950 can update gain according to formula (1). It can also use current signal strength and previous signal strength provided by memory device 940 and current gain and previous gains provided by memory device 960 to update the gain. Further, the gain generating device 950 can make use of the information from other portions of the receiver. The information could be whether it is at the beginning of a new package or in the middle of the current package, how far the receiver is away from transmitter, and how fast the receiver and transmitter relatively moves.
With the information provided by memory devices 940 and 960 as well as from other portions of the receiver, the digital AGC 900 is able to update the gain in a more complex and flexible way. For example, the gain generating device 950 could use a channel model corresponding to a particular circumstance, estimate the most possible signal strength of the amplified signal if ADC were perfect, and generate gain dynamically according to that particular circumstance.
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|Clasificación de EE.UU.||455/234.1, 455/240.1, 455/226.1, 455/250.1|
|Clasificación internacional||H03M1/18, H04B7/005, H03G3/30|
|Clasificación cooperativa||H03G3/3036, H03M1/185, H04W52/52|
|Clasificación europea||H03G3/30D, H03M1/18B4M, H04W52/52|
|17 May 2009||FPAY||Fee payment|
Year of fee payment: 4
|5 Jul 2013||REMI||Maintenance fee reminder mailed|
|22 Nov 2013||LAPS||Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees|
|14 Ene 2014||FP||Expired due to failure to pay maintenance fee|
Effective date: 20131122